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No fix to clumpy unit movement - Page 8

Forum Index > StarCraft 2 HotS
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Yogurt
Profile Blog Joined June 2005
United States4258 Posts
October 25 2012 01:33 GMT
#141
I only wish an end to the clumping so watching sc2 is much more exciting
ok dont not so good something is something ok ok ok gogogo
KrazyTrumpet
Profile Joined April 2010
United States2520 Posts
October 25 2012 01:37 GMT
#142
I don't understand this obsession with wanting to "de-clump" units. You want to make it automatically easier to mitigate AoE damage? You want marines splitting vs banelings to be suddenly something everyone can do? Some of the best micro we've ever seen is on the fly army control/splitting in order to avoid AoE damage...and people want to take that away?
www.twitch.tv/krazy Best Stream Quality NA @KClarkSC2
winsonsonho
Profile Joined October 2012
Korea (South)143 Posts
October 25 2012 01:51 GMT
#143
On October 25 2012 05:48 [F_]aths wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 25 2012 05:28 Apolo wrote:
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.

If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)


-Dustin Browder


So much passion... wait...

Telling the community, their customers, that they're wrong about their preferences. Nice. Each time they talk, it surprises me less and less why their recent games haven't been up to their usual (older) standards.

DB is an RTS expert compared to almost any unit movement complainer. We can trust his conclusion more than the wish of someone who does not understand the game to a level as an expert.


Go Wiki DB and check the 'great' games he made.. Blizzard are just lazy..
Doktillia
Profile Joined March 2012
14 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 02:06:41
October 25 2012 01:54 GMT
#144
It's not about 'Promoting'/'destroying' micro its about "Maintaining" it. When you split your armies (APM), whether you attack or retreat... you immediately begin to lose the apm you've invested into your army "in a counter intuitive way".

In a War, if you decide to separate your army into different squads and tell them all to retreat... they would only clump up when surrounded by the enemy, or blocked by Terrain. Its just unnatural to tell your Army to retreat and they clump up as if they are surrounded (when they clearly are not). Its doubtful that in a war-zone the general has to tell his armies to retreat... and then re-split... then retreat... then re-split. Splitting an army (once accomplished) is generally something that should be maintained.

EDIT: I don't want units to naturally be 'De-clumped', that's exchanging the seated Player with SunTzu. I just don't want to see someone having to repeatedly mitigate damage from their Mutalisks (for example) when they are attacking/retreating multiple times in a harassment. If they've invested into splitting then their present APM shouldn't counter their past APM. (Unless they order the units to ball up by clicking somewhere near the 'middle' of the splitted forces)
Existor
Profile Joined July 2010
Russian Federation4295 Posts
October 25 2012 01:57 GMT
#145
On October 25 2012 10:37 KrazyTrumpet wrote:
I don't understand this obsession with wanting to "de-clump" units. You want to make it automatically easier to mitigate AoE damage? You want marines splitting vs banelings to be suddenly something everyone can do? Some of the best micro we've ever seen is on the fly army control/splitting in order to avoid AoE damage...and people want to take that away?

SO what the problem of doubling range/radius of all aoe weapons/abilities?
quistador
Profile Joined March 2011
United States43 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 02:17:37
October 25 2012 02:16 GMT
#146
On October 25 2012 10:37 KrazyTrumpet wrote:
I don't understand this obsession with wanting to "de-clump" units. You want to make it automatically easier to mitigate AoE damage? You want marines splitting vs banelings to be suddenly something everyone can do? Some of the best micro we've ever seen is on the fly army control/splitting in order to avoid AoE damage...and people want to take that away?


Who wants to take that away? You have not read this thread, or the other thread and seen what people have to say in support of this... or you lack imagination.

Either way, no one will take "some of the best" micro you've seen away. Why the hell would micro vs aoe disapear? Clumping of your units is still easily possible by clicking within their magic box, and indeed, there will be situations clumping is prefered. What if those situations were AMPLIFIED! What if new micro situations arose due to this change?

Why are people fighting complexity?

Even Dustin Browder knows the complexity that could arise from this change when he talks about all the EXTENSIVE testing his team would have to do to make sure it didn't break the game... yet he says it does nothing, HAH!
SarcasmMonster
Profile Joined October 2011
3136 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 02:25:25
October 25 2012 02:24 GMT
#147
This is what the move command looks like now:
[image loading]

This is what it should look like (with a buff to AOE radius and/or damage, this is VERY IMPORTANT). Taken from Maverick's video:
[image loading]


Please stop with the misconceptions that the change "automatically mitigates AOE". Stronger AOE means you MUST split or else your units melt.


Most importantly, it looks way more better and natural.
MMA: The true King of Wings
mongoose22
Profile Joined July 2012
174 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 02:31:41
October 25 2012 02:30 GMT
#148
On October 25 2012 10:57 Existor wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 25 2012 10:37 KrazyTrumpet wrote:
I don't understand this obsession with wanting to "de-clump" units. You want to make it automatically easier to mitigate AoE damage? You want marines splitting vs banelings to be suddenly something everyone can do? Some of the best micro we've ever seen is on the fly army control/splitting in order to avoid AoE damage...and people want to take that away?

SO what the problem of doubling range/radius of all aoe weapons/abilities?


For one, doubling the radius quadruples the area. That also means that way more of the map is covered by the AoE, yet the map size didn't change. Did you not double the speed of all the units? Then now it's way harder to get out of AoE because it covers so much more area, unless you already had a split twice as good as the spread you needed to have a chance of avoiding the AoE before. And if you don't split, now there's really no way to get your units out of the full area of a storm, and one fungal now covers your entire army.

Plus, 18 range Collosus with the upgrade. Yeah.
Alex1Sun
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
494 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 03:01:14
October 25 2012 02:32 GMT
#149
I have to agree with Dustin.

I am not sure that changing unit clumping alone would remove death balls. If anything, it would make death balls stronger, because units in a death ball would automatically pre-split and suffer less damage from AOE.

I believe a proper change against death balls should incorporate stronger positional space-control units and stronger AOE or a combination of these changes. For reasoning please have a look at this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=373484
This is not Warcraft in space!
MateShade
Profile Joined July 2011
Australia736 Posts
October 25 2012 02:32 GMT
#150
On October 25 2012 11:30 mongoose22 wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 25 2012 10:57 Existor wrote:
On October 25 2012 10:37 KrazyTrumpet wrote:
I don't understand this obsession with wanting to "de-clump" units. You want to make it automatically easier to mitigate AoE damage? You want marines splitting vs banelings to be suddenly something everyone can do? Some of the best micro we've ever seen is on the fly army control/splitting in order to avoid AoE damage...and people want to take that away?

SO what the problem of doubling range/radius of all aoe weapons/abilities?


For one, doubling the radius quadruples the area. That also means that way more of the map is covered by the AoE, yet the map size didn't change. Did you not double the speed of all the units? Then now it's way harder to get out of AoE because it covers so much more area, unless you already had a split twice as good as the spread you needed to have a chance of avoiding the AoE before. And if you don't split, now there's really no way to get your units out of the full area of a storm, and one fungal now covers your entire army.

Plus, 18 range Collosus with the upgrade. Yeah.


He exaggerated it a bit.. but have to agree here, the consequences are a lot more complicated than you guys are making it out to be
Zombo Joe
Profile Joined May 2010
Canada850 Posts
October 25 2012 02:35 GMT
#151
Units not clumping up means battles will last a lot longer, instead of looking away from your army for 2 seconds only to get fungaled to death.
I am Terranfying.
Alex1Sun
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
494 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 02:56:34
October 25 2012 02:47 GMT
#152
On October 25 2012 11:35 Zombo Joe wrote:
Units not clumping up means battles will last a lot longer, instead of looking away from your army for 2 seconds only to get fungaled to death.

I guess, this change can't be made in a vacuum. In order to retain a skill-cap with this automatic pre-split you'll need stronger AOE and rebalance a lot of things. Otherwise with this change alone you'll only make deathballs stronger and less micro-intensive because they will auto-presplit themselves against AOE.
This is not Warcraft in space!
MasterCynical
Profile Joined September 2012
505 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 03:33:25
October 25 2012 03:17 GMT
#153
holy shit this video should just be fucking removed.



Edit the OP to include the video of the game played on the mm map or just say that it makes absolutely no difference at all in an actual game.
everyone who sees it will just be like "OMG THIS WILL FIX CLUMPING AND DEATHBALLS". Even the followup videos that he uploaded of this applied to an actual game and even a video made by HDstarcraft showed that it made no difference at all.

In reality what happens in an actual game situation that it literally makes 0 or .1% of a difference because players have a tendency to purposefully ball units and they just clump up automatically when turning around corners. If you don't believe me or Dustin or anyone else who says this, go on battlenet and fucking play the modified movement maps as if you're playing seriously.
EatThePath
Profile Blog Joined September 2009
United States3943 Posts
October 25 2012 03:24 GMT
#154
On October 25 2012 11:47 Alex1Sun wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 25 2012 11:35 Zombo Joe wrote:
Units not clumping up means battles will last a lot longer, instead of looking away from your army for 2 seconds only to get fungaled to death.

I guess, this change can't be made in a vacuum. In order to retain a skill-cap with this automatic pre-split you'll need stronger AOE and rebalance a lot of things. Otherwise with this change alone you'll only make deathballs stronger and less micro-intensive because they will auto-presplit themselves against AOE.

AoE isn't the only thing. If engagements are less-DPS dense, the opportunity to get value from unit control alone explodes. AoE is a brute-force way of answering density, it should be a strategic factor, not a stand-in for positioning and repositioning your units. It also collapses the timescale of an engagement making little things recede in the face of big ticket priorities for APM, which will be simply casting AoE and some basic target-firing.

Think about early game fights where the players spend so much attention on the smallest details of unit control, because it actually matters. Something like 5-10 supply of army. Now multiply that opportunity for gain by detailed unit control by 10 or more in a major engagement near maxed supply. Things aren't dying as quickly, there's is more time to micro different areas of the fight, the positioning of the battle can shift and reshift over 30 seconds of intense fighting, with different local "winners" across more than a screen of space.

The balance with less clumpy units would be totally different, reliant on micro. Who knows what you might need to change.

The AoE could be stronger/bigger, but it wouldn't necessarily have to be.
Comprehensive strategic intention: DNE
winsonsonho
Profile Joined October 2012
Korea (South)143 Posts
October 25 2012 03:48 GMT
#155
OK, so pathing isn't going to be changed.. And some people seem to like clumping. However, it still seems ridiculous that units clump up SO MUCH! 200/200 should not be able to fit into such a tight space.. DPS density is therefore so high that battles last seconds. Please let me know who likes this?

If unit collision radius were slightly increased the ball would be a little more spread out without pathing changes. DPS density drops a bit and battles last longer. Furthermore balling up your entire supply should become less than optimal because some of your army is not engaging in ball v ball battles. Hence it becomes advantageous to rather split your army up into squads so that they can flank larger armies. Also a smaller army can at least do some damage to a bigger one.

In the real world a big stacked up army can take a lot of casualties from smaller spread out squads. This barely ever happens in SC2 unless the bigger army is well soft/hard-countered.

Some changes to unit collision radius could have the following effects:
1. Lower the DPS density (making deathballs suboptimal)
2. Generally lengthen battle times
3. Allow for stronger positional play
4. Make battles more micro intensive
5. Doesn't affect lower level players (a-move still OK, just not optimal)
6. Looks better (unit orgies don't look good to me)
7. Ramp issues (some work for blizzard)
8. Aoe less strong (blizzard buffs and balances, more work for them again)

So blizzard can just try it out in hots, if it looks good they just put a little effort into balancing things. Its quite a change but to me seems like mostly positives. Death to the deathball.

Discuss!?
quistador
Profile Joined March 2011
United States43 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 04:38:41
October 25 2012 04:36 GMT
#156
On October 25 2012 12:48 winsonsonho wrote:
If unit collision radius were slightly increased the ball would be a little more spread out without pathing changes. DPS density drops a bit and battles last longer. Furthermore balling up your entire supply should become less than optimal because some of your army is not engaging in ball v ball battles. Hence it becomes advantageous to rather split your army up into squads so that they can flank larger armies. Also a smaller army can at least do some damage to a bigger one.


I don't think creating an invisible bubble around units is the right solution. It's not spectator friendly and it still leaves us with less than adequate unit control. People in support of this just have to keep posting their opinion until the bliz team can't take it anymore. There is a thread on the European battle.net too-> http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/5723363987

It's ridiculous that they are so pressed in getting HOTS out ASAP that they couldn't even consider a change like this.

Like I've said, the AOE numbers are already balanced around how many shots kills a base unit, only the radius would have to be balanced.

The main advantages to this (aside from an observer's POV) is longer battles due to optimal formations, and greater returns from small micro decisions.

Balancing should not be a huge issue. Don't forget the META balance will take place and little to no changes may be necessary.
Don.681
Profile Joined September 2010
Philippines189 Posts
October 25 2012 07:00 GMT
#157
I think the #1 reason to do this is because it just looks better.

I mean, we can discuss on a per-strategy or a per-unit basis regarding balance after we all have laddered with it, If ever Blizzard wakes up and puts it in.

All this talk about how its going to fix or break anything is a bit moot. I mean, for me, it's like discussing the effect if creep color was changed to Blue because it will look pretty but Protoss units will be harder to see when they walk on it or something to that effect.

I bet all those that disagree about any balance ramifications will agree that, cosmetically, it makes SC2 feel more natural.
[F_]aths
Profile Blog Joined February 2010
Germany3947 Posts
Last Edited: 2012-10-25 08:33:16
October 25 2012 08:31 GMT
#158
On October 25 2012 06:19 WinterNightz wrote:
Show nested quote +
On October 25 2012 05:48 [F_]aths wrote:
On October 25 2012 05:28 Apolo wrote:
We have already decided it's not useful, that's why we didn't put it in a patch. I'm not going to waste time, energy and resources testing something that doesn't do anything positive for the game. A change like this will require extensive testing and take a lot of effort to make sure it didn't break anything in campaign or anywhere else in the game.

If you don't agree, that is totally cool. Go test it now. You have an editor. I'm not stopping you. =)


-Dustin Browder


So much passion... wait...

Telling the community, their customers, that they're wrong about their preferences. Nice. Each time they talk, it surprises me less and less why their recent games haven't been up to their usual (older) standards.

DB is an RTS expert compared to almost any unit movement complainer. We can trust his conclusion more than the wish of someone who does not understand the game to a level as an expert.

I really have to ask: where does this confidence come from? Is there anything in his resume that screams "this guy knows what he's doing"? The only question I really need to ask myself is, "what exists in SC2 that wasn't taken straight from BW that has actually added interesting gameplay dynamics?". At least in my mind, the only examples are the Phoenix and the current incarnation of the Widow Mine.

I just think: why would anyone look to DB and be so inspired to have faith when there's incredibly smart people like QXC and Day[9] (I admit I'm biased. hmc'10) that clearly understand what makes an RTS interesting and entertaining so much better.

Qxc and Day[9] were probably under the impression that it would be possible to have it not only appear more BW-like, but to have it play out more like BW.

SC2 is not BW, and Dustin Browder knows that. One would need to not only change movement and spreading, you have to make a whole new game, only to remake an old game. An old game which found almost no new players in the western world.

Unit clumping can be good to focus damage, but bad to avoid splash damage. Unit clumping makes it harder to follow a battle, but you can only do so much for entertainment value.

I really doubt that Day[9] or Qcx know *better* how to make a game than DB with his team. (Dustin just leads the team, he does not make all decisions by himself.) DB already led a team which made WoL, the most successful RTS in years. Day and Qcx are only players. Very smart players, but they have not shown yet that they can develop a game like Starcraft. They probably would use what they already know – Broodwar.
You don't choose to play zerg. The zerg choose you.
SarcasmMonster
Profile Joined October 2011
3136 Posts
October 25 2012 12:25 GMT
#159
Props to Archer for linking to this thread http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/6573699544?page=6#104

If you guys have really good arguments, you should post them in that BNet thread.
MMA: The true King of Wings
leveller
Profile Blog Joined April 2010
Sweden1840 Posts
October 25 2012 14:27 GMT
#160
Some of us has been talking about this since the WOL beta... I want it simply so the game looks better and more organic
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